"Take bas-reliefs," he said. "You'd think that things carved in stone would be tasteful and dull. But - oh, boy."

I immediately added "reliefs" to the list of Stories I Really Need to Write Someday. Bush and his writing partner, Jim Parsons, have jobs (Preservation Houston), books ("Houston Deco," "Fair Park Deco") and other grown-up credentials as historians. But they're also wickedly, drily funny.

Last week, I made them give me a tour.

1. Keck Hall (formerly the Chemistry Building), Rice University.

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More comic reliefs

* The Great Southwest Building (formerly the Petroleum Building), 1314 Texas at Austin. Lead architect Alfred C. Bossom believed that Mayan pyramids were a great model for the American skyscraper; that's why Mayan-like reliefs adorn the main part of this 1927 building - possibly the first Houston office building with an attached garage. Maybe that's why the reliefs on the garage itself, on the Austin side, show a grotesque head of a driver, complete with driving goggles and a driving cap. He looks terrified.

* Hermann Professional Building, University of Houston Health Sciences Center, 6410 Fannin. Over the Fannin entrance of this 1949 building, scaffolding now hides a bas-relief procession of realistic sick people, presumably entering their doctor's offices to be healed. "The whitest white people in the world," Bush calls them. (The sculptor, like that of the Baylor pathology snakes, is Edward Galea.) On the other side of the building, facing Main - the half of the building completed in 1958 - the entrance is flanked by vastly different and even stranger reliefs by Finnish sculptor Mauno Oittenen: empty-eyed, somewhat fetal characters frolic and play music. "On one side of the building, you come in realistic but sick," said Parsons. "Then you exit the other side healthy but Danish modern."

* Abercrombie Laboratory, Rice University. A strange godlike figure, clad in an odd robe that reveals his six-pack abs, draws energy from the sun with his left hand and shoots it out in a ray with his right in 1948's "Man Drawing Power From the Sun and Transforming It Into Energy" by William McVey. There are oil derricks and power plants in the background, so presumably he's an allegory that has something to do with engineering. But he looks like a bad guy from the X-Men.

L.G.

"These first reliefs are different from the others," Parsons said, turning on his blinkers as we parked outside Keck Hall. "They were supposed to be funny."

The Chemistry Building was finished in 1925; Rice, all of 13 years old, still was a crazily ambitious little school out on the Texas prairie. "They were trying to create an instant history for themselves," Parsons explained, "so they included in-jokes in the building."

We stopped near an arch, and Parsons pointed up to a stone carving at its side. "That's William Ward Watkin, Rice's dean of architecture who designed the building," he said. "And see under his feet? That's a student." Another relief depicts Harry B. Weiser, the head of Rice's chemistry department, as a long-necked, winged monster devouring a student.

(Later, Parsons emailed me that Watkin shared design responsibility for the building with the architecture firm Cram & Ferguson; that art professor James Chillman Jr. designed the reliefs; and that they were carved by Oswald Lassig, the amazing Austrian stone carver who did so much of Rice's early work. As a grown-up, responsible historian, Parsons is required to know such things.)

"Oh, yeah," said Bush. "The other Jim Parsons is from Texas and plays a genius on TV. So people assume that, of course, he's really a genius, and that he's out writing books about Art Deco in Houston and Dallas."

We stopped outside Baylor College of Medicine's Roy and Lillie Cullen Building, a white-limestone Art Deco building that, from a distance, looks sedate. But up close, it's utterly strange. One carving, over a door, appears to show Moses wielding a giant mortar and pestle; another, in a side plate, appears to show a goddess with lightning-bolt hair, bestowing wisdom in front of what appears to be a shelf of lab-research bunnies. Metal reliefs show medicinal plants like ipecac, which makes you vomit; and something that appears to be a bong.

"Who carved these?" I asked. We made out the name, Parsons pulled out his phone, Googled and found the answer on houstondeco.org, a website he and Bush had created. "Edward Galea," he read in a mock-serious voice. "A native of Malta who studied sculpture in Rome."

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Lifestyle

"This one is my favorite," said Parsons, looking up at a stone relief. At its center, a book labeled "pathology" seems to radiate light. But far more notable was the rest of the relief: a half-naked woman fleeing three snakes, labeled "diseases."

"What does this teach you?" asked Parsons.

"Avoid disease?" I guessed.

"Or maybe," he said, "don't get chased by snakes when you're topless?"

At Hobby Airport, we stopped at Houston's first air terminal, a lovely 1940 building that reminds us just how different the past really was: Once upon a time, flying was glamorous. Little stone reliefs depict flight past, present and future; "future" in this case, meant a DC-3 with a propeller not only in front, but also on top, like a helicopter.

Even better, though, are the two identical stone friezes over the building's front and back entrances, the friezes that would have most caught air travelers' attention as they departed and arrived in Houston. "Winged Mercury," by sculptor Dwight Holmes, shows an angel-winged man, arms raised to the sky in triumph. He's naked except for a Charles Lindbergh-like leather pilot's cap and, of all things, a tiny propeller plane that functions as a loincloth - a fig leaf for the age of aviation.

I gazed up, speechless.

"Is that a plane on your crotch, or are you just glad to see me?" cracked Bush.